Translator: Emma Dovlatyan
Reviewer: Ellen Maloney Did you know that January 23rd
is the Day of handwriting? And it is the birthday of John Hancock. He is famous for his handwriting. America celebrates
the International Day of Manuscripts on this very day. Some of you just confirmed it,
some just got to know, others may be surprised to know
that there’s such an international day. Well, it really exists. Our handwriting plays
an important role in our lives. Even in medicine,
handwriting is being used for diagnosing and curing the patient. It’s even possible to describe
someone’s personality from their handwriting. For example, me, as a child,
I had large handwriting. According to psychologists,
this is typical of outgoing people, who share their secrets with many people. While now I have small
and round-ish handwriting, which is typical of secretive people. So over the years,
my handwriting has changed according to the changes
in my personality as well. In some school, copybooks,
pens, chalks, and blackboards have been replaced by computers. Kids even forget their handwriting. But, according to CNN, a study conducted in 2006, among pupils
of first – fifth grades revealed that kids could express more thoughts
when writing with pens than computers. It’s connected with different
functions of the human brain. There are plnety of well-known and also undiscovered
manuscripts all over the world. One of that undiscovered ones
belongs to Voynich. This book was written
approximately 600 years ago, in an unknown language,
by an unknown author. Psychologists tried to decode it
several times, but there’s no results yet. The only important conclusion they had
is that it has logical structure, and is written in an artificial language. Isn’t this strange? When I heard about this book
for the first time, I was so excited that I decided
what profession to choose in the future. I am dreaming of becoming a specialist
of manuscripts, who decodes them. Did you know that there are
31,000 Armenian manuscripts that are kept all over the world? And also there are manuscripts
that are kept in people’s houses as inheritance, and the owners
may have no idea how important those
manuscripts can be for our history? To end, I’d like to tell about
an experiment conducted by a French priest. He said, “Every person
has his or her inner world, appearance, voice,
as well as handwriting.” He asked lots of people
to write something on a sheet of paper,
so he had a huge collection. He compared letter shapes,
their sizes, and obliquity and he came to a conclusion. He said, “As we cannot find
two identical people, we cannot find two
identical handwritings. So we can surely say
there are as many handwritings as there are people on the Earth.”